System Collapse, ch. 3, p. 39: "I saw I had four private messages waiting from Arada, Amena, Overse, and Pin-Lee. I can’t do that right now. Pretending I’m fine for Mensah was hard enough."
8, 165: "Then he sent me a note back: So, you may not know this, but I read your letter to Dr. Mensah, the one you sent when you left Port FreeCommerce. I think you’re absolutely the right person to write this. I can’t handle that right now so I’m just going to archive it for later."
10, 212: "As I led the humans into the hangar, the contact with AdaCol2 started to drop. I sent, End session, acknowledge. It sent back, End session. There was a pause, then: Be safe. I can’t deal with that right now."
emotions: install "people respect and care about me" updates now!
murderbot: remind me later, remind me later, remind me later--
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[12,000 years into the future]
Two teenagers, wandering the outskirts of civilization, take a small detour from the day’s adventure, drawn by the mysterious allure of a metal sign.
The taller, the leaner of the two takes the initiative. He approaches the object of interest, paying no mind to the now-clicking meter clipped to his legwear.
“Well, well, well, what is one of these babies doing in a place like this?”
“It’s an old, forgotten corner of the world, dumbass,” bites the second, a shorter, rounder boy, “where vintage, nerd shit reigns supreme.”
The taller boy draws yet closer. “I mean, how is this thing even still standing?” He asks with a laugh as he rattles the post back and forth.
The plate creaks as it is playfully thrashed about, before falling from its place, down into the sand.
“Welp, there’s your answer. ‘Cause we hadn’t come around yet,” the little cynic shrugs.
“Oh, shut up, you,” the jester playfully retorts.
“What does it even say?”
“How’s about we find out for ourselves, bud?”
As the investigator lowers himself to read, the bystander, still a few paces back from everything, notices a glyph that makes the distance close in the blink of an eye.
“WAIT, HOLY SHIT, IS THAT ENGLISH?”
“Woah, now that you mention it, you’re right! Heh, you and your vintage nerd shit! Good eye, bro!” He offers a fist bump, but the once-dismissive youth is now too absorbed to notice.
“This must be from before the New Age! Give me a minute, I can probably read this, if all this rust’ll let me.”
In a rare show of excitement, the boy leans in a bit closer, just close enough to barely - yet unmistakably - make out the first two lines.
THIS PLACE IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR.
/SRS
“what the fuck-”
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Brickclub 5.1.2, “What Can One Do In the Abyss But Converse?”
I’m just going to let my reblog of Bird’s post stand for my 5.1.1 reaction; I don’t have anything to add.
This chapter--god, there’s just so MUCH in this chapter. Plowing straight in:
--The title is a reference to another Fontaine fable, “The Hare and the Frogs”: “A hare in its resting-place pondered / (For what else can you do in a resting-place but ponder)?” Donougher’s not: “The fearful hare realizes it scares the frogs, and concludes that there is no coward on earth who cannot find another more cowardly than himself.” Animal symbolism is usually significant in this book, but there is no cowardice at hand--however, in the previous chapter, there was a reference to the attackers of the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple calling its eighty defenders cowards for not coming out to be slaughtered. Maybe this is a reminder that the National Guard, last seen being spooked by a wheelbarrow, are bringing all the violence we’re about to see, in panicked terror, on an enemy much weaker than themselves. We’re reminded in this chapter that there are only 37 defenders left, and that they have no more food or water.
--“The insurgents under Enjolras’s supervision--for Marius no longer paid attention to anything--”
Marius had a moment, after Enjolras tried to make him co-leader, where he actually was paying attention; having made up his mind to kill himself, he snapped out of his usual state onto his other setting, the one where he has executive function. He was inspecting the defenses of the little barricade when he met Eponine.
That’s over now; he’s still acting with tremendous efficiency, but he’s no longer noticing anything. (And this is the only mention of him in this chapter, the second in the volume and the first set at our barricade.)
--“Enjolras recommended two hours’ sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a command. Still, only three or four of them took his advice. Feuilly devoted those two hours to carving this inscription into the wall opposite the tavern: VIVENT LES PEUPLES.”
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Enjolras is the undisputed leader of the barricade, but his people have a finely-tuned sense of which of his orders are actually suggestions (and it’s most of them). Feuilly--effectively the second-in-command, who we last saw in command of the snipers on the upper floors--spends his time crafting a rebuttal to the jingoisitic and insulting graffiti we saw at Hougomont.
Everyone, however, respects Enjolras’s banning of the bottles from the cellar.
Enjolras calls the ground-floor tavern “the mortuary”: it holds Mabeuf, laid out dead on the table, and Javert, tied upright to the pillar; in the light of the room’s single candle they together form a cross shape. It’s an echo of the image of the nun at the post, in the ground-floor brick cloister room of the convent--the image that so terrifies Valjean. Valjean disregards that warning, burying himself alive, and becomes so fascinated by this living death that he starts praying before the penitent nun herself. It’s part of a history of venerating the Infinite’s intermediaries as proxies--we see him kneeling on the bishop’s step at the end of 1.2--but it leads to him performing his own cross-shaped prostration in front of Cosette’s outgrown and embalmed mourning dress.
This isn’t a good image--but it’s undercut by two things. One is the presence of Mabuef, harmless in his life and heroic in his death. And the other--as we will see later--is Javert’s stubborn refusal to take any message from it, good or bad.
--Joly finally delivers his rebuttal to Grantaire’s argument about revolutions showing God’s poverty (and this comes after a reference to Grantaire re: the proscribed bottles, so we’ve just been reminded of him):
“What is the cat? he exclaimed. “It’s a correction. The good Lord, having made the mouse, said, “Oh dear, that was a mistake!” And he made the cat. The cat is the mouse’s erratum. Mouse plus cat are the revised and corrected proofs of creation.”
We were introduced to the theme of the cat-turned-lion as revolutionary back in The Year 1817, in the context of the statue of a cat at, appropriately, ancient Corinth. This is the final word on that metaphor: Revolutions are Providence’s way of correcting the world, but it’s a correction as simple and natural as the cat catching mice; and revolutionaries--far from being Great Men, or even unusual ones--are as common as cats, or can be, if the cats rise to the occasion.
And immediately following this, the rebuke to the Great Man model is underscored by Combeferre.
Combeferre is starting to fray--he’s not flailing like he will be in a couple of chapters, after they learn they’ve been abandoned, but he does go here in one paragraph from elegies for the dead to a justification of Enjolras’s remorse over Le Cabuc to a comparison of translations of the Georgics to a justification of the killing of Caesar which is mostly concerned with who has the right to bitchy literary criticism. Condensing a great deal: “Genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less subject to carping”--but Cicero’s harsh words against Caesar are not this; they are justice, meted out “by the intellect just as Brutus metes out justice by the sword,” and both kinds of justice are leveled against Caesar deservedly:
“He was a great man: too bad. Or so much the better--the lesson is all the more edifying. His twenty-three wounds affect me less than the spittle in Jesus Christ’s face.”
This is one of two comparisons Combeferre is going to make between Great Men and Christ in these chapters--the other is Napoleon’s cannonball vis-a-vis the light ray. Religion seems to be on his mind in a way it hasn’t been that we’ve seen before, which is understandable enough. And like I said, he’s starting to fray. But he’s also drawing a distinction here between Genius, which deserves respect, and Greatness, which doesn’t; and between Providence and the Great Men who, whatever their power, can still only be its tools.
It’s fitting that Marius has vanished from this chapter--he’s still sunk in Great Man mode, and that has no place here. The last words of the chapter are given to Bossuet, who climbs onto a pile of paving-stones and delivers an apostrophe to the demes of Athens.
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